On Oct 19, Intelsat IS-33e broke up in geostationary orbit. Our Cyprus sensor captured fragments just hours after the event. More updates soon! 🚀 pic.twitter.com/u33JVyk5ZP
— spacefluxHQ (@spacefluxHQ) October 20, 2024
On Oct 19, Intelsat IS-33e broke up in geostationary orbit. Our Cyprus sensor captured fragments just hours after the event. More updates soon! 🚀 pic.twitter.com/u33JVyk5ZP
— spacefluxHQ (@spacefluxHQ) October 20, 2024
Zerosquare (./4167) :Scientists Accidentally Discover Strange Creatures Under a Half Mile of IceWIREDResearchers only drilled through an Antarctic ice shelf to sample sediment. Instead, they found animals that weren't supposed to be there.
An academic journal has retracted two papers because it determined their authors used unlicensed software.
As noted by Retraction Watch, Elsevier's Ain Shams Engineering Journal withdrew two papers exploring dam failures after complaints from Flow Science, the Santa Fe, New Mexico-based maker of a computational fluid dynamics application called FLOW-3D.
"Following an editorial investigation as a result of a complaint from the software distributor, the authors admitted that the use of professional software, FLOW-3D program for the results published in the article, was made without a license from the developer," a note from the journal's editor-in-chief explains.
"One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that the article does not violate any intellectual property rights of any person or entity and that the use of any software is made under a license or permission from the software owner."
Elsevier, based in the Netherlands, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
https://www.science.org/content/article/gene-behind-orange-fur-cats-found-last
It would be pretty easy to guess that Garfield was a tomcat even if you didn’t know his name—or didn’t want to peek under his tail. Most orange cats are boys, a quirk of feline genetics that also explains why almost all calicos and tortoiseshells are girls.
Scientists curious about those sex differences—or perhaps just cat lovers—have spent more than 60 years unsuccessfully seeking the gene that causes orange fur and the striking patchwork of colors in calicos and tortoiseshells. Now, two teams have independently found the long-awaited mutation and discovered a protein that influences hair color in a way never seen before in any animal.
https://www.science.org/content/article/amid-cuts-basic-research-new-zealand-scraps-all-support-social-sciences
This week, in an announcement that stunned New Zealand’s research community, the country’s center-right coalition government said it would divert half of the NZ$75 million Marsden Fund, the nation’s sole funding source for fundamental science, to “research with economic benefits.” Moreover, the fund would no longer support any social sciences and humanities research, and the expert panels considering these proposals would be disbanded.
Universities New Zealand, which represents the nation’s eight universities, called the planned disinvestment in social science and humanities “astonishing.” It was among several academic groups and many scientists calling for the government to reverse the unexpected decision.
In announcing the change, Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology Judith Collins said the fund should focus on “core science” that supports economic growth and “a science sector that drives high-tech, high-productivity, high-value businesses and jobs.”
)People are bad at reporting what they eat. That’s a problem for dietary research
Science.org
Studies that use surveys to link dietary patterns to human health may be irredeemably biased, new paper suggests
https://www.science.org/content/article/peacock-feathers-can-be-lasersPeacocks have a secret hidden in their brightly colored tail feathers: tiny reflective structures that can amplify light into a laser beam. After dyeing the feathers and energizing them with an external light source, researchers discovered they emitted narrow beams of yellow-green laser light. They say the study, published this month in Scientific Reports, offers the first example of a laser cavity in the animal kingdom.
Objects as big as a protein can be in two places at once, experimental ‘Schrödinger’s cat’ suggests
Science.org
For decades, physicists have debated the scale at which quantum theory stops governing the behavior of matter. Now, researchers have observed the most massive objects ever to enter a superposition, a quantum state in which the objects can potentially exist in multiple locations at the same time—smashing the previous record by a factor of 10. In a study published yesterday in Nature, the team clustered more than 7000 atoms of sodium metal (pictured) into larger chunks, which they then sent through three gratings constructed from laser beams. As the metal particles traveled through the gratings, they behaved like waves, leading to a bizarre outcome suggestive of a superposition. Coming out the other end, each piece of metal was potentially in one of two different locations 133 nanometers apart, a distance more than 10 times greater than the particle’s width. The experiment demonstrates that it’s possible for objects as massive as a protein to be in a superposition, Nature reports, helping answer the long-standing question: Is there a scale of objects that serves as a transition between quantum and classical mechanics?
